Aaron
Swartz: Believe you can change. Do you believe
that your abilities are fixed and that the world
is just a series of tests that show you how good you
are, or that everything comes through effort
and that the world is full of interesting challenges
that could help you learn and grow?

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones: Why
You Should Be Wary of Price Discrimination in the
Retail WorldMy problem in general is that
price discrimination in the retail world generally
benefits the middle class, the non-elderly, and
the highly educated. In fact, loyalty card data is
often used specifically to attract that class of
customers. The lower prices for these groups are
subsidized by higher prices charged to the poor,
senior citizens, and the not-so-bright.

Long, but a good use of Sunday reading time: John
Cusack & Jonathan Turley on Obama’s
Constitution. We have a treaty, actually a
number of treaties, that obligate us to investigate
and prosecute torture. We pushed through those
treaties because we wanted to make clear that no
matter what the expediency of the moment, no matter
whether it was convenient or inconvenient, all nations
had to agree to investigate and prosecute torture
and other war crimes.

Daniel Cawrey writes, in Firefox
Competitive Strategy Must Focus On Privacy,
Since Firefox is the only truly open browser and
its features do not depend primarily on investor
concerns, Mozilla has a unique opportunity to go to
great lengths protecting the privacy of its users
while they are on the Internet.

That's a great idea. How about a compromise?
Instead of dropping User-Agent entirely, minimize
it to a single common string, one that contains the
commonly sniffed information. Start with a privacy
option to enable this minimal User-Agent, and give
sites a chance to fix their sniffing when the early
adopter privacy-hawk users turn it on. When it works
for the privacy freaks, make it the default.

(Got the mindless link propagation generator to
start putting in "via" links a lot of the time,
so join the content curation conversation and stuff.)

Valerie Aurora: Yes,
brogrammer culture is pervasive (there's certainly
a weird dynamic in the industry where a lot of the
jobs that require you to be nice to other people
are held by women: event staff, PR, and so on,
and a lot of the "elite" <blink>ninja rock
star</blink> jobs are held by men.)

David Maynor on the 0-day market: Who
will fight for me? (In the long run, the
existence of this market is great news for software
QA staff. Companies will have to keep QA people
happy, or disgruntled ones will sell their findings
elsewhere. I always picture these transations as
happening in the back of a William Gibson dive bar
for some reason.)

The Red/Yellow
Card project (a way to respond to creepy people
at conferences) is a great idea, except for the
small problem that trolls might run a scavenger
hunt with the object of deliberately getting cards.
To reduce the lulz to be had from this, I suggest
leaving one of each type of card in the men's room,
so that simply holding a card doesn't mean anything.

If you see me at a conference please give me a few
cards and I'll help with this. A few men's room
users willing to do this would encourage the seeking
of lulz elsewhere.

It doesn't look as if many of you are really
using versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer
before version 8. Up-to-date browsers
support the q tag, but, as Stacey
Cordoni wrote in 2006, Because of IE/Win’s
lack of support for the Q tag, the Q tag is not used
by many web designers or web authors.

(You should see the quotation, the part after
the comma in the previous sentence, inside
quotation marks. On old versions of MSIE, before version
8 fixed it, the quotation marks don't show up.)

It looks like most of my traffic that seems to be
from old MSIE is just spam scripts pretending to be
old MSIE. Here's a vintage browser:

Looks like it just did a GET on the home page and a
POST to the comment spamtrap. So user experience in
that browser is not going to be a priority.

I know the User-Agent is probably fake, but I almost
want to believe in the DIGITAL MARKETING POWER GURU
who's actually been running this thing all these
years. Maybe the inventor of web comment spam just
paid me a call.

Anyway, if you want to use a version of MSIE earlier
than 8 on this site, you will probably start seeing
quoted text that doesn't make sense because of the
q problem. I don't want to join the
browser of the week club, but I want to get rid of
the typewriter quotes, too. It might make sense to
upgrade.

As you can probably tell if you've been reading
this site on a browser and not in a feed reader,
I've been dorking around with the layout. Right now
the whole three-column thing is gone and everything
is in one column. I don't know if I'm going to do a
media query thing to move stuff into other columns,
or just clean up the one-column thing and have it
look all minimal and stuff.

Anyway, the blogroll section here has gotten a little
out of date, and since I now have a Python script
that now pulls in...let's see...3875 feeds, I made
it dynamically generate the blogroll based on who's
actually posting, and what I've been linking to.
Some obvious ones in there ("Schneier on Security",
"Doc Searls Weblog") and some not so obvious.

Yes, I know that the grumpy
wizards are at work in the blogroll iframe but
not on the rest of the page, I'll see what I can do.

Castle writes: "Brands like BMW are in a unique
position to both (a) stop the money and (b) demand a
rebate from their ad agency or ad network. But then
we are always told that none of these ad networks
(or ad exchanges) profit from piracy because their
contracts say they don’t."

But this isn't just a problem with ads ending up on
user-generated content, or user-"generated" infringing
content. The power of the ad is in its ability to signal
that the advertiser spend money on the ad. An ad on
a cheesy illegal download carries no signal at best,
and more likely a signal in the wrong direction.

Dalton Caldwell writes about the problem
of advertising on inexpensive content here: Hot
Dogs & Caviar. He makes the excellent
point that the Valley hasn't converted cheap
content "hot dogs" into high-performing
ad "caviar". Now it seems that we're
starting to realize that there is no adtech Holy
Grail. Infringing, user-generated, and other
cheap content fails to carry the signal that costly
content does, no matter how much math you do on it.

Couple of bonus links. This piece, How BuzzFeed
is bucking banner ads with curated content and
social advertising, has a—well, let's just
say "direct"—view of online advertising's
effectiveness: "99% of internet users do not
click ads and those that do are often members of
the wrong audience—older, lower income, basically
irrelevant." (They probably drink Thunderbird wine and
run Microsoft Internet Explorer, too. Who needs them?)

Interesting post by Bill Lee: Marketing
Is Dead. (Maybe the answer is two steps:
first stop treating "social" as part of marketing,
and second, stop de-skilling customer service jobs,
and unblock experienced service and support people's
access to social sites.)